Generally, a refrigerator is partitioned into a freezer room and a cold-storage room. The cold-storage room stores food and vegetable at a temperature of 3˜4° C., whereas the freezer room deep-freezes food such as meat and fish to store at a temperature below zero for a long term.
Various functions such as a vegetable (Kimchi) storage and the like are provided to a refrigerator for user's convenience. An ice-making is one of supplementary functions of the refrigerator, which will be explained in the following.
A refrigerator configuration, in which a cold-storage room is provided to an upper part thereof and in which a freezer room is situated under the cold-storage room, is explained with reference to FIG. 1 as follows.
Referring to FIG. 1, a cold-storage room 1 is provided to an upper part of a refrigerator body and a freezer room 2 is provided under the cold-storage room 1.
Doors are provided to selectively open/close the cold-storage and freezer rooms 1 and 2, respectively. And, an ice machine is provided to the freezer room 2.
The ice machine consists of an icemaker making ice and an ice bank storing the made ice therein.
Since the ice machine is provided within the freezer room situated in a lower part of the refrigerator body, a user opens the freezer room to pick up ice from the ice bank directly.
However, the related art refrigerator has the following problems.
First of all, since the ice bank is provided to the freezer room situated at a lower part of the related art refrigerator having the ice machine provided within the freezer room in the lower part of the refrigerator body, it is inconvenient for a user to bend over to pick up the ice.
Namely, in the related art refrigerator having the ice machine provided within the freezer room in the lower part of the refrigerator body, the ice machine is situated at the freezer room in the lower part of the refrigerator. Hence, to pick up ice, a user needs to bend over to open the freezer room and then pick up the stored ice out of the ice bank while bending over.
Meanwhile, a downward ice pickup mechanism using a dispenser can be provided to the freezer room. In such a case, a location of the ice bank is too low. Hence, it is difficult to employ a system of discharging ice to a lower position via the downward pickup mechanism.
Namely, in case of adopting the related art downward ice pickup system while the ice machine is left in the freezer room at the lower part of the refrigerator body, a user needs to further bend over. Hence, more inconvenience is caused to the user instead of removing the inconvenience in use.
Therefore, it is difficult to adopt the related art downward ice pickup system in the structure having the ice machine provided to the freezer room in the lower part of the refrigerator body. A new ice pickup structure is needed to remove the bending-over inconvenience.
In case of providing the ice machine to the cold-storage room in the upper part of the refrigerator body to remove the inconvenience in use, a separate insulation space for ice-making needs to be provided within the cold-storage room. Hence, an inner space of the cold-storage room becomes limited in space. In addition to the configuration, in case of installing the dispenser for picking up the ice at the freezer room, the aforesaid inconvenience still remains and the freezer room becomes excessively narrow.